


Before the Light

by eLJay



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Gen, Religious Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-07 23:25:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/754325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eLJay/pseuds/eLJay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The creation story Athelstan doesn’t tell them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Before the Light

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by notbecauseofvictories' post about the creation stories in Genesis (http://notbecauseofvictories.tumblr.com/post/46946459625/in-which-i-tell-everyone-they-are-wrong-about). I urge you to read it before you read this.

They told him a story about a giant born of poison whose body the gods used to create the world.  It was so different from the story he knew, knew in his bones and his blood.  His was a story not of actions or grotesques but of words, of the Word, and he did not think they would be awed by it, awesome though it was.  If he told them, they would smile and shake their heads, thinking it a poor tale indeed; they could do nothing but laugh at the foolish priest, who believed that

_In the beginning, before anything else, He was.  Faceless, tripartite and unified, omnipotent He hovered.  And though there was yet only absence He saw—everything that ever would be, everything that never existed, every soul who would walk a still-unformed earth.  In the beginning He was the great imagination: He saw in the nothingness countless lights fixed or free or flickering, and ripples and rivulets of the flood to come and the flow of the Jordan, and hill and desert, moorland and valley; He saw a garden of a world, abloom with flower, weed, herb, tree; He saw lumbering creatures, wriggling creatures, fluttering flapping creatures, beasts of grace and beauty and beasts foul and cruel.  While there was nothing, He saw, and infinite in might He willed it, and it became because He_ spoke _.  In a voice like thunder and like a whisper on the wind He created all, with a power no other god could lay claim to.  There was void and He filled it, and said that what He had made was good, as with love He had made it.  Even knowing what was to come, what sin and death and war and slavery and darkness His people would suffer and cause, He called it good._

“So how do you think it was made, priest?”

It was more to beg forgiveness for, howsoever he answered.  For not telling them would betray the Great Commission; but telling them would betray his selfish heart, holding tight to something that belonged only to him, some knowledge he could not be forced to share, some ember of faith inside that he would protect, would not allow to die, no matter the cost.

And the darkness would not overcome it.


End file.
